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A Look Back at the Romance of Laura Ashley

BATH, England — Mention Laura Ashley to a woman of a certain age, and the immediate response is a wistful smile and a nostalgic story about a soft, ruffled cotton dress and a special summer evening or unforgettable party.

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From 1974, a Laura Ashley cotton floral print dress, aka "Campion."

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Laura Ashley Archive

It is that kind of a connection between a designer’s clothing and the girls and women who wore them that will be celebrated in “Laura Ashley: The Romantic Heroine,” an exhibition opening Saturday at the Fashion Museum in Bath, the town in western England best known for its Roman ruins and allusions in Jane Austen.

Rosemary Harden, the museum’s curator, said it was almost two years ago that she first thought about a display of Ashley’s work — drawing together the 60th anniversary of Laura Ashley (founded in Laura and Bernard Ashley’s London kitchen in 1953), the 50th-anniversary celebration of the Bath museum and the fact that the first large Laura Ashley store had been in Bath.

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A cotton floral print dress from 1973 or 1974.

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Laura Ashley Archive

The result is a selection of 100 garments some from the museum’s own 800,000-item collection; some from the Bowes Museum in Durham, England, where the show will travel in late August and be on display until early 2014; and some from the archives of the clothing company. The company, owned by Malayan United Industries since 1998, still sells clothing, but today it makes much of its revenue from home decor products like paint, wallpaper and custom-made draperies.

Ms. Harden said it had been natural to narrow the exhibition’s selection to Ashley’s work in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. “It was a time that was unique, special” for the clothing company, she said. “They were creating the ‘Laura Ashley’ dress.”

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A long cotton dress with a hunting dog and deer print design from 1972.

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Laura Ashley Archive

While designs changed as the decades passed, the quintessential Laura Ashley still has a pintuck bodice, a high collar with a tiny lace trim, a puffed upper sleeve and fitted lower one and a long skirt with a ruffle finish. “It was formulaic, but it worked,” Ms. Harden said, noting that while Ashley is strongly associated with small floral prints and a sort of milkmaid or governess style, her early print designs featured a lot of heraldic and medieval motifs.

As for Ashley’s being a romantic heroine, the designer herself, who died in 1985, saw her work in a storybook light, telling a New York Times reporter in 1977 that her clothes had “always been highly romantic because I’m highly romantic.”